Updated 1/4/12

They say that the definition of madness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. In which case, the eleventh Doctor really is a madman with a box. His messing about with time has brought about the end of the universe twice in the space of 18 months. But he really should know better, given that this incarnation owes his existence to the consequences of rewriting time, in the longest, most complex and most ambitious “story arc” the series has ever attempted.

In World War Three the ninth Doctor says that Harriet Jones’s historic three-term premiership will be remembered as a new Golden Age for Great Britain. Six months later, in pretty much his first act as a fully-cooked incarnation, the tenth Doctor re-writes history and deposes her. And that is his downfall.

Consider that for a moment: the first act of the tenth Doctor’s life is the cause of his downfall.

How so? I’m glad you asked. Harriet Jones’s untimely removal clearly wrought havoc with history. The ninth Doctor unambiguously states that she was known to posterity as a three-term Prime Minister. The tenth Doctor ends her reign after less than a year. Time has been rewritten because the Doctor has decided Harriet Jones is not worthy of her office.

And that opens the way for all kinds of changes. In the general election triggered by her resignation, the victor was Harold Saxon. Now, presumably, the Master (for it is he!) took advantage of time being rewritten to write himself into 10 Downing Street. Certainly, there’s no suggestion that he had to engineer a prime ministerial vacancy, nor resort to the crude methods of the Slitheen. And, once in power, the Master turns the TARDIS into a paradox machine to allow the last of humankind to decimate their ancestors and conquer the Earth, taking further advantage of what is presumably becoming a kind of temporal weak spot.

As we know, the Doctor becomes the Space Jesus and undoes the Master’s time-vexing naughtiness (although not, we note, his own time meddling). And that, it seems, is that. Except exactly one year later, Harriet Jones makes a reappearance, mounts a spirited defence of her own record and the need to defend the Earth – and is exterminated for her efforts by a bunch of Daleks that, in a roundabout way, exist because the locks around the Time War are starting to break down.

So, in the space of two years, the great white hope of Great Britain has been humiliated, deposed and murdered, largely due to the intervention of the Doctor.

And at this point, the Doctor nearly loses his own life – and it’s only thanks to a handy keepsake from his previous encounter with Harriet that he’s able to cheat death. But the threads linking his first adventure and his eventual death are starting to draw together.

And it gets worse. The Master, as usual, had a Plan B. Saxon’s followers organise his resurrection just in time to take advantage of the Immortality Gate (which, incidentally, is a piece of alien technology that would surely have been snapped up by Torchwood had the tenth Doctor not also brought them down), which in turn allows the Master, in a slightly roundabout way, to finally break the locks and release the Time Lords from their imprisonment at the end of the Time War.

And once the Time Lords return, it really is the end for the Doctor. And all this because he has rewritten time in a small act of spite against one woman.

I think this is a deliberate and clever story that Russell T Davies played in the background of David Tennant’s time as the Doctor. Certainly in interviews, Davies has said that Saxon emerged just after the fall of Harriet Jones to take an advantage of a new gap in history. And there is something ultimately right in seeing perhaps the most cocky Doctor undone by an unthinking moment of over-confidence, as though this incarnation is being punished for his character flaw in the same way Troughton’s Doctor had to finally stay behind to clear up the results of his anarchy, or Pertwee’s Doctor paid the price for his own intellectual pride.

And for viewers who haven’t followed four series worth of plot unfolding, Russell T Davies kindly re-plays the tenth Doctor’s hubris in miniature in The Waters of Mars. Saving Adelaide Brooke is presented as the action of a man who thinks he is above the law – who, if you like, has risen higher than ever before. But in changing history, the Doctor fails to save Adelaide, The lesson the Doctor takes from that story is time can be rewritten – but the consequences are unpredictable and horrifying. And he seems to grasp that he will not survive it: his reaction to Adelaide’s death and the appearance of Ood Sigma: “Is this it? My death?” In the following episode, we learn that events from the Doctor’s past are now impacting on his present and the future. “Time itself is bleeding,” says the Ood Elder. And the Doctor is the one who made the first cut.

All the way through the Russell T Davies years the series has looked over its shoulder at the Hartnell era, when the Doctor would not even save one young girl from the Massacre for fear of altering time. Father’s Day showed the consequences of altering established history. The Fires of Pompeii directly addresses the fate of Anne Chaplet by having the Doctor relent and rescue Caecilius and his family from Vesuvius.

But the ultimate lesson Davies leaves us with is that even the Doctor is not above the law: that he can’t just go about changing history to suit himself, or to guarantee that, say, a grumpy miser will do as he’s told at Christmas. Trying to cheat, to alter the facts to fit your views, is the kind of self-destructive behaviour we expect from the villains, not the Doctor. It’s a lesson his next incarnation seems to have forgotten, but which, perhaps, he needs to re-learn if he’s to avoid a similar fall.

In this instance, Genesis of the Daleks is a good reference point: the fourth Doctor’s much-quoted “Do I have the right?” speech isn’t really about whether he has the right to kill the Daleks – he’s done that many times before – it’s about whether he has the right to re-write time. Taken alongside Davros’s earlier speech about genocide setting him up above the gods, the Doctor is reflecting that if he does play God and chooses to change history, he puts himself in a similar position – and he has to then take responsibility for the consequences of his choice, which in this case includes a whole new timeline. Or, to put it in Davies’ own words, “If you could choose, Doctor, if you could decide who lives and who dies… That would make you a monster.” Time can be rewritten, says Russell T Davies, but if you do, you become a monster.

The whole Moffat era so far seems to be circling a similar conclusion without quite reaching it (yet). The eleventh Doctor’s careless manipulation of history is undermining the whole morality of the series. Kazran Sardick’s personality is changed so the Doctor can get out of a tight spot. The sequence of cause and effect has been cheated, with sonic screwdrivers appearing from nowhere to save the day. Death loses all meaning. Actions no longer have consequences, and therefore no-one needs to take responsibility. History is now the Doctor’s playground, and we are his playthings. No wonder every nightmare in the universe formed an alliance against him: the Doctor has become the biggest monster of all.

I’ve been reading the first Kindle volume of Philip Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum, and have been thoroughly enjoying it (Troughton soon please!). I’ve been particularly interested in Sandifer’s surprisingly vehement and provocative views on the run of episodes between The Myth Makers and The Ark:

“For all his skill in making a good programme, the fact of the matter is, the 24 episodes produced by John Wiles are mean-spirited, reactionary, and, frankly, in the final analysis, racist.”

While I think this reads rather too much into Maureen O’Brien being sacked, and the general rubbishness of Dodo, I do think there are significant problems with Wiles’ episodes which Sandifer’s book reminded me of. And in my mind they are problems that are almost exactly similar to the creative issues that plagued the programme during the mid-1980s: a gaping void where the Doctor is supposed to be.

Wiles produced The Myth Makers, a comedy for three quarters of its length, which ends with an infamously bleak massacre of its characters, the abrupt and downbeat departure of Vicki, and Steven mortally wounded. Four episodes later, Vicki’s replacement as “girl companion”, Katarina, is killed off, and eight episodes after that, her replacement, Sara, goes the same way. Then we have a story which is explicitly about practically everybody being horribly killed – even the Doctor (or at least, his double), and finally an adventure that almost has the TARDIS crew casually wipe out the last remnants of humankind just because of their reckless arrival on the space ark. This isn’t just about shaking the show up after the cosy comedy of Season Two. It’s a sustained assault on the Doctor himself by a producer who, you sense, just cannot believe in the character’s essential heroism and “goodness”.

In the Wiles episodes, every victory is achieved only at a terrible cost – if there is any victory at all. The Myth Makers and The Massacre are about the Doctor and Steven merely surviving their ordeals. In The Ark, they stop humankind dying out, but condemn the weakened survivors to domination by the Monoids. Companions die. The Doctor brings destruction in his wake. This is a long way from one year before, when the Doctor could reverse the Dalek Invasion, unmask Bennett, outwit Nero, and trounce the Morok Empire without breaking into a sweat.

Perhaps Wiles thought the Doctor was too powerful. Perhaps Hartnell’s act as a kind of senile delinquent giggling his way through time and space was an inappropriate response to Viking raids and the enslavement of the ant people. It won’t be the last time in the programme’s history that an incoming producer has deemed things “too silly” and vowed to bring a new sense of seriousness. But in so doing, the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater. The Doctor is suddenly ineffectual, and shown to be ineffectual because not only can he not save everyone, but he can’t even save anyone. Katarina escapes from Troy, but her death is only deferred. Sara doesn’t outlive her first adventure. Anne Chaplet must remain in Sixteenth Century France to face her doom. That last failure is so jarring and so fixed in fan memory that 40 years later The Fires of Pompeii directly addresses it.

And the problem is not only that the Doctor fails – the serialised format of the classic series means that most stories rely on the Doctor not succeeding for large chunks of time – but that he fails at the critical moments even to save the people he most cares about. The same problem crops up again in the mid 1980s: Adric dies, Tegan leaves after a breakdown, Peri either dies or else is abandoned. The Doctor continually leaves a vast body count in his wake so that every planet he lands on resembles a crime scene, and he bemoans the fact that “there should have been another way”. And in some ways the problem in the 1980s is less egregious because Eric Saward takes it to the logical extreme by having the Doctor put on trial and revealed to be the ultimate foe, after which there’s really nowhere else you can go with the idea (and wisely, Saward’s replacement didn’t even bother to try). Wiles, meanwhile, just seems to shrug his shoulders, sigh and walk away.

To Sandifer, this lack of resolution represents a “ludicrous failure… to quite resolve the ongoing plot arc of the Doctor’s inadequacy.” I’m not entirely sure I accept Sandifer’s premise. The Doctor’s inadequacy in Season Three is less a story arc and more the failure of the imagination of a producer who apparently despised his leading man and had no natural sympathy for the programme. Or to put it another way, Wiles genuinely thinks the Doctor is not up to saving the universe. And perhaps far from being “mean spirited and reactionary”, there’s a different cause. In an interview with DWM, Wiles alludes to an idea he had for the Doctor meeting God, in much the same way as Captain Kirk in Star Trek V. He says, “Of course it would be proven all is not as it seemed.” The subtext I see is that Wiles can’t believe in gods and heroes (and see The Myth Makers for another hint of this), and that includes the Doctor. Only we can save ourselves. I think Russell T Davies addresses this by having especially the ninth Doctor inspire us to take control of our own destinies. But Wiles never comes up with such a compelling alternative, and so ends up as the grumpy old man who tells kids there’s no such thing as Father Christmas. Basically, Kazran Sardick was producing Doctor Who in 1965-66.